Fundraising and Development Editing and Proofreading Services

Fundraising is the part of the sector where writing is most obviously the product, and where the most damage is done by writing that works. Appeals that manipulate raise money this year and cost the organisation its relationship with the people it describes. Cases for support built on a need so urgent it can never be resolved leave donors wondering what a decade of giving achieved. The craft is producing writing that is genuinely persuasive and that the organisation can still stand behind when the person in the photograph reads it.

We edit what fundraising and development teams produce — cases for support and their variants for different audiences, individual giving appeals and direct mail, regular giving and upgrade asks, major donor proposals and cultivation material, legacy and in-memory giving copy, trust and foundation applications, corporate partnership proposals, campaign and capital appeal material, event and challenge event copy, donor reporting and stewardship communications, thank-you letters and welcome journeys, supporter care and complaint responses, fundraising strategy and case documentation, and ethical fundraising and gift acceptance policies. Our editors check that the appeal and the annual report describe the same organisation.

The case for support is the document everything else is cut from, and the recurring failure is that it describes need rather than making an argument. A case setting out how many people are affected and how terrible it is establishes that a problem exists, which the reader already accepted, and never says why this organisation should be the one to receive the money. We build these so the argument runs: here is a specific problem, here is why it persists — the mechanism, not the misery — here is what this organisation does that addresses that mechanism, here is the evidence it works, here is what more money buys at the margin, and here is what will not happen without it. The marginal question is the one funders and major donors are actually asking and the one cases most often skip: not what the organisation does, but what the next £50,000 changes. And we make sure the people the work is about are described as they would want to be, because the case will be read by them eventually.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including donor information, strategy and material in draft. We are editors rather than fundraising consultants or regulatory advisers, and we offer no view on strategy, on fundraising regulation or on gift acceptance decisions. What we can do is make the argument sound and the writing honest enough to keep working.